“They [Ukrainians] beat us [Bolsheviks] for a long time, and obviously at last we have understood that basic truth, that, first of all, Soviet power cannot be created in Ukraine without Russian communists and the workers of Petrograd and Moscow.”
Dmytro Manuilsky (1919)

“As far as the mass of the RCP in Ukraine [in 1919] is concerned, right-up to its leadership they have no sense whatsoever of Ukraine, of the particularities of the Ukrainian revolution, or in general, that Ukraine is a separate country and not “southern Russia” or “Little Russia.””
Georgii Lapchynskii (1926)

The books under review do not deal directly either with imperialism or colonialism. Indeed, one author specifically refuses to use these concepts while the other uncritically accepts them as given. Both, however, provide much new archival information about the early Soviet period and the workings of the political system that raise questions about how to characterize the relations of dominance and dependency they describe and with what best to compare them.
Gennady Efimenko explains that the Russian Bolshevik need for Ukrainian resources determined their policy toward Ukraine. He reminds us that national issues cannot be confined to the linguistic/ethnic but must include the economic, and that the massive resistance that forced Lenin to grant Ukraine cultural and linguistic concessions in late 1919 failed to shake the control that by then Moscow had established over its economy and resources.^[1] Efimenko writes that what frightened Bolshevik leaders and prompted them to act was that their Ukrainian party comrades would follow the example of the Finnish Social Democrats and then, instead of paying for Ukrainian resources with worthless money or taking them by force, they would have to pay in gold or trade commodities for them. This terrible prospect appeared imminent in the first week of December 1917, when the Rada declared it would create a national bank and currency. Then, on December 6, not only did Finland declare independence, but the First Ukrainian Congress of Soviets recognized the Rada as Ukraine’s single legitimate government. Petrograd immediately declared this decision “illegal” and quickly set up a puppet regime in Kharkiv.^[2] Petrograd then ensured that its new satellite remained in the ruble zone by denying it the right to print its own money. In July 1918, the Russian party branch in Ukraine, residing then in Moscow, formally gave Ukraine’s economy to Russia and in January 1919 it was placed under Russia’s VSNKh (Supreme Soviet of the National Economy) (Efimenko, Pp. 90, 142). In a five-week period between March and May 1918, fleeing Bolsheviks took from Ukrainian provinces 714 locomotives, 7,134 loaded freight wagons, and 2,000 wagons of grain. During the first four months of 1919 they sent 800 wagons of manufactured goods (Pp. 8, 77). In Soviet terminology this was called “fraternal aid.” People usually refer to analogous “exchanges” between European and Asian or African countries as “colonialist exploitation.” When Efimenko later notes (P. 135) that already in 1918 Bolshevik Russia had produced twice as much weaponry as it had gotten from the tsarist army, it becomes obvious that Ukraine got little for its grain and rolling stock not because Russia’s manufacturing capacity had collapsed, but because the Bolsheviks had focused it on arms production.
Efimenko reminds us that Russian Bolsheviks did not link their “right of nations to self-determination” with political or economic secession of non-Russians from the tsarist empire and the ruble zone. They did not imagine Soviet Russia as a single national economic unit but as the heir of the imperial economic system that had to be restored as a precursor to a single centralized world socialist economy. Two presumptions underlay this attitude: that Russia needed Ukraine economically and that national state borders impeded the integration necessary for economic progress – in Marxist terms: “the relations of production mitigate against separation.” While it is an exaggeration to claim they were untroubled by Ukrainian autonomy until the Rada began setting up a national bank and currency, Efimenko is right to have drawn attention to the impact of those initiatives and that the first act of Moscow’s Kharkiv satellite on December 20 was to declare them void (P. 66). He cites Sverdlov, who wrote to Artem in early 1919: “Sometimes one is horrified by the wave of political independence coming in from Ukraine, Lithuania, Estonia, Belorus, etc.” (P. 118). As noted, Lenin had to compromise with the “left” Ukrainian Bolsheviks in November 1919, but he gave no economic concessions to the Kharkiv government, and that set fatal limits on Ukrainian development. As a Georgian communist pointed out in 1922, Russian Bolshevik talk about cultural-linguistic rights was meaningless because without a national economy there could be no national culture or language or any need to learn languages other than the one used in economic relations – which in the USSR was Russian (P. 164).
Efimenko has written an important book that should be read by anyone interested in Ukraine’s revolutions and comparative imperial studies. The fact that he had limited access to English-language literature, even having to use Russian translations (thereby illustrating the sorry condition of Ukraine 17 years after independence), does not detract from the worth of his analysis. However, the analysis does suffer from a failure to devote enough, or sometimes any, attention to key issues related to Ukrainian and Russian history, dependency, legacies, and the place of the economic in policy and relationships. Hopefully the author will elaborate on these in his promised subsequent volume on the 1920s. This review will consider four of these issues.
One missing issue is an examination of Ukrainian-Russian economic relations from the perspective of theories on colonies and empires.^[3] Did Lenin know Ukraine could be classified as a Russian colony, as opposed to an “annexed territory,” but avoid admitting it not only because of censorship but because he was reluctant to concede it was a fit object for secessionist national – liberation and a national communist party, like any other colony?^[4] Why did Lenin look at the Russian empire in terms of Development of Capitalism in Russia (1899), but at other empires in terms of Imperialism the Highest Stage of Capitalism (1916)?^[5] Engels and Marx, it will be remembered, argued that Ireland needed its own communist party and that its independence was not contingent on revolution in Britain. When at the 8th Party Congress (March 1919) Piatakov pointed out it was absurd to simultaneously talk about economic centralization and national self-determination, Lenin could only retort with vague statements about “historical conditions” and the need to “act with the utmost caution.”^[6] The connection between Russia, its economic interests, re-conquest of tsarist possessions, and Bolshevism, in short, cannot be treated as a fortuitous result of circumstances as Efimenko claims (Pp. 43, 93). The link was clearly articulated in late 1920 by Stalin who, conflating Russia with its empire, explained that Russia was the hearth of world revolution and needed the resources of its “border regions” (okrainy Rossii). What he did not explain was how the “union” supposed to provide these resources to Russia was different from the “yoke of imperialism” that these “border regions” would supposedly otherwise suffer at the hands of British and American capitalists.^[7]Insofar as Bolsheviks understood imperialism as a product of capital overaccumulation, and Russia had little national capital, in theory, the “ruble imperialism” of the sort Sergei Witte (finance minister of Imperial Russia) had practiced in the far east before them, was bound to fail. Nonetheless, as Efimenko shows, but does not call by its name, that is what the Bolsheviks practiced. Stalin’s referring to an “inner Russia” and “outer Russia” was merely an attempt to ignore national borders and avoid the issue of imperialism and colonialism within the ex-tsarist space. His obfuscation did not prevent Ukrainian or Tatar communists (Sultan-Galiev) from identifying and condemning the aggressive territorial expansion of the Bolshevik Russian state as renewed Russian colonialist imperialism – not as a result of fortuitous circumstances.
Efimenko presumably could not obtain the most important Ukrainian analysis at the time of the role of economics in political independence: Shakhrai and Mazlakh’s Do khvyli (1919) that, in reply to Bolshevik claims about productive forces demanding political union, argued that just because one country is economically tied to another does not mean both cannot be independent states.^[8] And since relations between Russia and Ukraine were essentially colonial, it continued, they should logically take the same course as relations between other metropoles and colonies, where “the relations of production mitigate against union.” Efimenko does, however, reproduce a document in which Ukrainian comrades reminded Lenin that: “The presumptuous characterization of Ukraine as a kulak country incapable of independent revolutionary creativity ... can only be labeled colonialist” (P. 192). There is no record of a reply.
A second issue that deserves elaboration is not only whether Ukraine “needed” Russia economically, but whether Russia “needed” Ukraine (Pp. 45, 90). Opinions at the time were not unanimous. A key debate at the First All-Russian Congress of Soviets of the National Economy in the summer of 1918 revealed that some leaders realized Ukraine was not economically necessary for Russia thanks to its Siberian resources. This was argued by the deputy head of VSNKh Vladimir Miliutin.^[9] Efimenko, however, misinterpreted the speech and instead cited Miluitin’s opponent on how Russia had to control Ukraine (Pp. 89, 127). Consequently, he overlooked an important emerging current in Russian thought at the time that was beginning to imagine a Russian national state as distinct and separate from the Russian empire. While individuals through the nineteenth century reflected upon where exactly “central” or “great” Russia was, in the summer of 1917 some center-left leaders began to see it as a political administrative unit.^[10] One of these was Maksym Slavinsky, a Ukrainian national activist and left Kadet, who was in charge of a special commission on territorial reform attached to the Provisional Government. In a draft reform project he proposed Russia have separate representation on that commission from other regions of the empire. Nothing practical emerged from this project, but that autumn, Kaluga provincial zemstvo leaders, formed a “Great-Russian Union” that took Slavinsky’s idea a step further; it sought to establish a separate Russian territorial-administrative unit. The idea of creating a Russian national state was never realized, but it showed Russians were beginning to think of a separate republic in a confederal arrangement with Ukraine.^[11]Clearly some Russians had realized imperial restoration was not an option and Miliutin’s speech revealed they included Bolsheviks. Presumably, Miliutin was supported by men such as the Red Army commander-in-chief Vatsetis, who argued that the army should be directed south and east and not weakened by sending troops west (47,000 against Ukraine and another 80,000 against Lithuania).^[12]
By identifying those who realized Russia did not need Ukraine economically, Efimenko might not have then so categorically asserted that the Bolsheviks “did not even want to imagine” a socialist Russia without Western Europe (P. 167) and have given a more nuanced account of why they reconquered Ukraine. Was news of revolution in Hungary, Slovakia, and Germany in 1919 crucial in sidelining the Miliutins and Vatsetises and allocating troops against Ukraine in the hope their arrival in central Europe would spark the world revolution? Could Moscow have left Ukraine to its fate and focused on the Whites to secure Siberian resources? Lenin, it must be remembered, opposed an independent revolution in Germany because if it were successful Rosa Luxemburg and the German Party would have displaced him and his party from the world socialist stage. In October 1918, alongside his support for the new socialist German government, he had backed a secret agreement arranged by Manuilsky with Volodymyr Vynnychenko, to recognize a non-Bolshevik socialist Ukrainian government – the Ukrainian National Republic. This was opposed by Stalin, Piatakov, and Zatonsky, who ignored the agreement, and it was they, in late November, who decided to invade Ukraine. Only in January did Lenin concur – before German communists attempted to seize power. Because the Bolshevik Ukrainian declaration (P. 125) that linked their revolution with the envisaged European conflagration appeared two weeks after the German attempt had been crushed, when Luxemburg was dead, and two months before the Hungarian revolution, it appears more as rationalization than motivation.
A third factor that Efimenko might have elaborated upon to better illustrate the interests and motivations behind policy, were the imperial-chauvinist prejudices of lower-level Bolsheviks. While some top leaders were probably more Marxists than imperial Russian nationalists, and more inclined to think in terms of economics and revolution, it is difficult to imagine the same for their subordinates. Sooner interested in prestige than economics they used Marxism to justify their imperial prejudices – which inclined them to align with the opinions of those like Piatakov, Zinoviev, and Kamenev, rather than men like Shakhrai or Zatonsky. These middle- and lower-level members in Ukraine were overwhelmingly Russians or secular Russified Jews who were educated on imperial Russian history books, and in power, like their leaders, used Russian as their official language, not Esperanto or Ukrainian. A distinct contempt for things Ukrainian among those who composed the “right” Katerynoslav faction of the party is a subject worthy of a monograph in its own right. It might be traced back to Plekhanov’s hate for Drahomanov and Shevchenko, and his condemnation of Engels in 1891 for referring to Ukrainians as a nation distinct from and conquered by the Russians that should freely be able to chose its political fate.^[13] However much an “internationalist” Lenin may have been, too many of his comrades seemed to have been more intent on destroying Ukrainian national independence for the greater glory of Russia than the world socialist economic order. “Scratch some communists,” Lenin said, “and you will find a Russian chauvinist.”^[14]
Russians were and are divided over whether or not the Bolsheviks were “Russian.”^[15] Ukrainians were not as they saw Bolsheviks, despite their miniscule Ukrainian membership, as Russian imperialists little different from the monarchist Black Hundreds.^[16] Accounts of Muraviev’s troops stomping on portraits of Shevchenko in Chernihiv and Kyiv in 1917–1918 are well-known. The only reason Red Guards in Kyiv did not shoot Volodymyr Zatonsky on the spot in 1918 because they heard him speaking Ukrainian was that he could show them his party card before they cocked their rifles. Russian Bolshevik support of communist Hungary and condemnation of Ukrainian Bolsheviks is inexplicable except in Russian nationalist terms. Other less-known examples confirm the depth of such distinctly non-Marxist attitudes toward Ukraine. In Izvestiia Iuga (March 24, 1918), we read: “The attempt to create an independent Ukrainian state ... is counterrevolutionary by its very nature.” In September 1919, the chief of staff of the Bolshevik 44th division explained that the Ukrainian National Republic was “a Jewish government.” The report about this speech contains no mention of reprimands. In a letter to Lenin in November 1919, Ukrainian communists told him the situation in Ukraine was as if experienced Black Hundreds preparing a counterrevolution were in charge of Soviet power there. Soviet power could triumph, they wrote, only if the Russian communist party stopped trying “...to impose ‘red’ (Russian nationalist) imperialism in Ukraine.”^[17] In February 1920 a comrade Vasil’ev, the Volyn province party secretary, explained to teachers that Ukraine could only be a Russian province because there was nothing to distinguish it from Russia.^[18] A returned Ukrainian prisoner of war claimed that the head of the Workers’ Peasants’ Inspectorate of the First Cavalry Army in early 1920, a certain Latipov, told him he didn’t care if 75 percent of Ukraine’s population died of hunger, and if they did not they would be shot anyway. That would make the remaining 25 percent obedient. “We need Ukraine, not its people.”^[19] Comrades Vasil’ev and Latipov presumably had not yet read the 8th Party Congress resolutions about the proletariat of oppressor nations using “caution” when dealing with “still surviving national feelings” of the “working masses of the oppressed nations.”^[20] In July 1920, Dzherzhinskii complained to Lenin that a great hindrance in the struggle in Ukraine was “the lack of Ukrainian Chekists.”^[21] In 1920 and 1922 only 24 percent of the delegates to Ukraine’s first two congresses of Poor Peasant Committees could speak Ukrainian.^[22]
A fourth question that deserved greater attention is the claim that Ukrainian Bolsheviks could have defended Soviet Ukrainian independence only if they had supported private peasant landholding, because this represented the major difference between Ukrainian and Russian society (P. 26). Advocation of state ownership and expropriation supposedly made Ukrainian statehood impossible. It is not clear why separate institutions in a socialist state would not have kept a Ukrainian socialized state separate and distinct from a Russian socialized state. Maoist China and Stalinist Russia remained different despite similar internal structures. As Marxists, Ukrainian Bolsheviks were expectedly hostile to landowning peasants even if they were Ukrainian. It is also unclear how Efimenko can claim that Ukrainian bolsheviks had no socioeconomic theory of national development to substantiate their advocacy of independence, or that they did not have a “Ukrainian model of transition to an industrial society.” The theory may not have been elaborated but its elements did exist in 1919 and may be found in Do khvyli and Ukrainian Communist documents submitted to the Third International asking for membership. Basically, they highlighted the significance of landless peasants and rural workers and the social economic and national differences between Ukraine and Russia. Some of these ideas even appear in two documents Efimenko reproduces (Pp. 181,184). At the 1919 Comintern Congress Ukrainian Communists explicitly stated that they wanted Ukraine to run its own economy and that it was nonsense to extend RSFSR organs into Ukraine.^[23]
Efimenko includes in his account important, previously unknown sources, illustrating Lenin’s cynical contempt for Ukrainian political independence even in its Bolshevik variant (Pp. 129, 132, 156), and reminds us that Lenin himself in April 1919 explicitly termed the Russian Bolshevik occupation of Ukraine a military conquest (P. 128). In November 1920, Trotsky explained to Lenin that Soviet power existed in Ukraine thanks to Moscow, Russian communists, and the Russian Red Army. The author might also have added that although Lenin thought it acceptable to call on the Russian petite bourgeoisie in November 1918 to defend Russia as patriotic Russians, and to be accepted as such by Bolsheviks because Soviet power guaranteed Russian independence, he condemned Ukrainian national Bolsheviks as “petty-bourgeoisie.”^[24] The book also reproduces in full in the appendix five documents, among which are two from Ukrainian Bolsheviks that describe how most party members and Russians in the country saw it and treated it as a colony – which draws attention to the question of colonialism.
Although Bolsheviks as well as common people in 1919 thought of Ukrainian-Russian relations in terms of “colonialism,” as Efimenko noted, he himself explicitly refused to use this word or the concept. It is inapplicable, he writes, because tsarist and then Soviet Ukraine lacked some of the major attributes of a colony. That is, natives could make careers in the imperial center; Russia unlike other colonial powers never contributed anything positive to any of its possessions; after 1917, there was no private ownership of the means of production; and that Ukraine’s main market was not its metropole but other countries (Pp. 16-17, 40). In addition, there was no border between Russia and Ukraine, or a legal difference between their inhabitants. Native Ukrainians formally had the same opportunities as Russians.
Before examining this issue in detail, we will turn to Mikola Doroshko’s book, which examines another element of colonialism, the fate of “natives” in government – not in the imperial center, but in their own country. Like Efimenko, Doroshko had limited access to English-language literature and used Russian translations, but his book is arguably the worse for it. Particularly unfortunate is that he was unable to read either Mace’s book or Terry Martin’s Affirmative Action Empire.^[25]
Doroshko focuses on Ukraine’s nomenklatura. This word refers to a list of loyal party members compiled by their superiors eligible to hold important government positions, and a corresponding list of positions open only to them and distinguished from lesser posts open to all (Doroshko, P. 91). This appointment system was secret and not mentioned in any statutes or laws, along with the privileges that accompanied each position. It was to ensure that only loyal personnel got jobs and that they remained under strict control. In practice, friends appointed friends and, as a result, the party-governmental system quickly evolved into the client-patron clan system so ably exploited by Stalin – who opposed Ukrainian communist attempts to establish their own nomenklatura separate from Moscow’s (Pp. 79, 93-94).
Doroshko reminds us how little support the Bolsheviks had among Ukrainians noting that in 1918 only 3 percent of its Ukrainian branch, 130 people, identified themselves as “Ukrainians.” The majority were Russians and secular Jews, albeit mostly born in Ukrainian provinces.^[26] His book then describes how the Russian party Central Committee appointed all top officials in Ukraine and created an “occupation regime” (P. 243). Besides sending Russian soldiers to Ukraine, Moscow also sent thousands of Russian civilian administrators there. The author clearly states, it must be stressed, that when he labels Ukraine’s Bolshevik government “non-Ukrainian” he uses the term in the political sense only. That is, it was a group of men, among whom were ethnic Ukrainians, who neither wanted nor knew how to “defend the national-state interests of the Ukr.RSR” (P. 29). Thus, Ukraine’s Central Committee in 1921, when famine was raging in their republic, not only carried out an order to ship 40 trains of foodstuffs monthly to Moscow, but on their own initiative ordered troops to accompany the requisition squads taking food for those shipments (P. 257). Doroshko considers Ukraine to have been a colony (P. 63) but does not analyze his subject in colonial/imperial/dependency terms, nor does he reflect on the dilemmas posed by split loyalties and dual identities.
Doroshko argues that Moscow recruited to positions in Ukraine primarily people who had nothing in common with either with the Ukrainian national-liberation movement or with Ukrainian national ideas.^[27] He describes the purges and personnel changes that occurred between 1920 and 1938, noting that by then only 8 percent of the party had belonged to it before 1920. Particularly valuable are the new data he provides illustrating the privileges and corruption of nomenklatura officials, and the depth of opposition by “right” centralists to korenizatsiia/Ukrainization. These latter included people who thought that even speaking Ukrainian was counterrevolutionary. Ministerial officials who belonged to central organizations that remained centralized despite korenizatsiia consciously sabotaged the introduction of Ukrainian, while Stalin specifically refused to place Ukrainian communists in charge of korenizatsiia in Ukraine (Pp. 290-297).
Doroshko writes that there were few declared Ukrainians among the higher party ranks and government officials appointed by Moscow (Pp. 21-22). He provides much evidence of widespread anti-Ukrainian attitudes within this group during the 1920s, relates it to the exclusion and/or removal of patriotic Ukrainians from government jobs, and notes that such targeted persons were labeled “nationalists,” a term with undesirable treasonous overtones in the Russified lexicon of Bolshevism (P. 335). He writes that the purges explain why there were so many in place in 1932–1933 willing to carry out the deadly food expropriations, and why remaining declared Ukrainians followed along (Pp. 308-324), yet were then eliminated nonetheless in their turn as “enemies.” Doroshko claims that throughout those years patriotic Ukrainians were systematically excluded or removed from all positions. He cites Oleksandr Shumsky who explained in 1926 that Russian communists ruled Ukraine through “collaborators” – “mezerni shkurytski typy malorosa” (P. 294). He cites an anonymous letter from 1927 that painted a similar picture: “There are no Ukrainians in charge anywhere.… If by chance one does make it, then the Russians and Jews destroy him [zaiidaly] and jail him… The oppression of and terror hanging over Ukrainians is horrific…. There are jobs for everyone except [declared] Ukrainians…. There are Jews, Russians, and renegades in the government and not one representative of the Ukrainian nation” (P. 299). In light of such statements it would appear that, despite korenizatsiia, little had changed in Ukraine from 1919 when Manuilsky remarked that Ukrainians in the Bolshevik government were mere window dressing – like natives in European colonial administrations.^[28]
But Doroshko gives too little evidence to support his claim of systematic exclusion of declared Ukrainians from positions. Skeptics, therefore, can doubt his assertion that despite korenizatsiia Bolshevik Ukraine remained what it had been at its inception, a colonial-type country ruled by an occupation regime. His failure to specify whether “Ukrainians” in the adjectival-national sense were purged, that is, persons who could function in Ukrainian and had an elemental sense of commitment to the Ukrainian Republic, or, whether it was “Ukraine’s nomenklatura” that was purged, obfuscates his argument (P. 342). More important, he does not break down his total figures by nationality and language use. Identifying only the highest officials by nationality, and giving scattered statistics on language use in unidentified institutions is insufficient (Pp. 104-108, 291-292). He does not present the figures he does have in charts, systematically and chronologically, nor does he always distinguish the relationship between party membership, nomenklatura positions, and total available government jobs. Logically, one might ask, if non-Ukrainians dominated leadership positions, would more of them than Ukrainians not have been purged?
The weakest parts of the book are the sections on korenizatsiia because they do not link personnel changes to the policy – indeed they are separated from each other by 100 pages. Doroshko is aware of the “nationalization” that occurred in Ukraine (Pp. 107, 356) but he does not link this to his argument about Ukraine being a colonial occupied country whose rulers excluded as many nationally/patriotically inclined natives as they could from government posts. In short his argument is muddled.
In fairness, it should be noted that the author states the Bolsheviks in 1941 destroyed many documents from the years 1927–1935 (P. 53), and that therefore we may never know the details of who was purged and why. He might have added that Soviet archival practice kept personnel files (lichnyi sostav) separate from their ministerial/departmental files and until 1991 access to them was restricted. Since they were filed in alphabetical order, thus including everyone from the caretaker to the commissar, analyzing remaining collections and distinguishing officials from “nomenklaturists” and from government employees, and then classifying by language use, would be an immense undertaking and, until this is done, Doroshko’s argument will be difficult to prove. Doroshko could have strengthened his case, however, by referring to two published works that contain valuable information about personnel and purges based on sources that he seems to have missed – in the absence of a bibliography, it is difficult to know. What we find in the first book are figures on government and party personnel according to language use. These reveal that although by 1925 their total had risen slightly from 1919, Ukrainian-speaking Ukrainians represented no more on average than half of the personnel in their republic’s power structures, and that their percentage share was lower the higher the level. In 1926 only 14 of Ukraine’s Central Committee’s 45 members could speak Ukrainian.^[29] The 1926 census showed approximately 50 percent of government administrators (sluzhbovtsi/sluzhashchie) in Ukraine declared themselves Ukrainian – the same as in 1897. The second book that no one interested in personnel issues under Stalin should ignore provides a breakdown by social group, nationality, and charge, of 687,116 people arrested in Ukraine between 1927 and 1938.^[30]
Throughout the 1920s Stalin exploited political rivalries to place his clients into positions and to remove opponents. What is missing from Doroshko’s book is an examination of how Stalin’s opponents were related to the politics of korenizatsiia. Doroshko does not distinguish between pro-Shumsky and pro-Skrypnyk national communists, and implies, but does not prove, that Kviring and then Kaganovych had instructions to specifically target Ukrainians (P. 282). Doroshko then claims Stalin allowed korenizatsiia because he had defeated his opponents and then secured his control with the help of “some” Ukrainian party leaders – among whom was Skrypnyk (P. 356). He even dismisses the policy as a ploy to show world opinion that the USSR was not a reincarnated Russian empire (Pp. 288-289). This is at odds with the generally accepted interpretation of korenizatsiia in Ukraine as a policy that Stalin used to keep apart from his opponents those “some” leaders, most of whom were the declared Ukrainians who were still in the party after the purges of borot’bisty and national communists in 1920–1921. That is, to keep his opponents in Ukraine apart from declared Ukrainians in the party, Stalin placed the latter in the republic’s higher echelons of power.
Doroshko does not consider reasons other than conscious exclusion/persecution that might account for the modest increase in native representation that did occur. For example, lower rates of literacy and urbanization among Ukrainians than among Russians and Jews, could account for their underrepresentation in government. Second, literate Ukrainians might have refused to work in an administration they considered foreign and instead sought employment in the private sector for as long as it existed. Elsewhere, Doroshko claims that Kaganovych consciously used coercion to implement korenizatsiia to discredit the policy (P. 292). On the one hand, this is asserted without proof, or mention that Stalin himself as late as 1929 apparently still considered korenizatsiia a necessary goal, not merely a concession, that would not have inclined him to use means that discredited it. On the other hand, the civil war had convinced Bolsheviks that force was acceptable in politics and administration, and that party members determined which policies to ignore and which to implement according to whether or not disobedience brought punishment, as Terry Martin explained. Was not the problem then with korenizatsiia the fact that it was not imposed by force? No more than a few hundred Russian “derzhymordy” were fired for resisting korenizatsiia during the middle twenties. “Ukrainian nationalists” were arrested by the thousands before, during, and after the twenties. Those involved knew how to interpret this reality.
In 1919–1921, Bolsheviks were as brutal toward Russians in the Don region and Tambov province as they were against Ukrainians – which reminds us that violence is not necessarily worse if perpetrators are “foreign.” People do not have to be colonized to suffer. Nonetheless, the question arises as to whether national governments were as ruthless toward civilians that they classified as enemies. Or, more generally, do indigenous ruling elites treat their own citizens during crises as ruthlessly as they might foreign subjects/nationals? Did British Belgian or German colonial officials in equatorial Africa before 1914 who oversaw the massive killing of innocent civilian native populations do so with few qualms because they did not see those people as “their own?” One historian has claimed that Europeans there killed about 50 percent of the regions’ population and left the rest as “cultural schizophrenics.”^[31] Even the British government used different policing tactics in England than it did in Ireland.^[32]
Some of the characteristics of colonialism as popularly understood do not figure in Ukrainian-Russian relations, while works like Doroshko’s do not convincingly demonstrate a colonial-type personnel appointment policy in the USSR. Russian rule in Ukraine, it might be added, did not result in Russian settlers and those of mixed Ukrainian-Russian parentage coalescing into a Russian-speaking creole class that led a national independence movement. Russians, Russified Ukrainians, and Russified secular Jews in Ukraine sooner resembled French settlers in Algeria. “More French than the French,” they opposed Parisian attempts to introduce liberal policies much as Ukraine’s creole Russified elite opposed Stalin’s korenizatsiia – most elementally by refusing to learn and use Ukrainian at work.^[33] How therefore to conceptually understand a system that indeed did allow “natives” like Manuilsky, whom Trotsky called one of the most disgusting renegades of Ukrainian communism” (P. 333), to make careers in the center, while simultaneously denying thousands of others jobs in their own countries because they were supposedly overconcerned about their country and thus, “nationalists?” While Russian Bolsheviks invited the Russian national petite bourgeoisie into their party as patriots, they arrested and/or killed Ukrainians for being national petite-bourgeoisie “counterrevolutionaries.” How to characterize a system wherein the government settled Russians from Russia into non-Russian territories and then created conditions of life for them there such that they had no need to learn the language of the country, and turned into colonial settlers rather than, in time, acculturated immigrants? While social mobility was possible for non-Russians in the Russian empire, unlike in European overseas colonies where native mobility was restricted to the colony, it was contingent upon linguistic Russification. This condition was suspended during the 1920s and reinstated after 1937.^[34] The fate of societies that do not assimilate newcomers, it might be added, is illustrated by American Indians – who by 1900 were living on reservations in what 300 years earlier had been their native lands.^[35]
Whereas some still restrict the concept of colonialism to West European overseas empires, many now accept that relationships there do not exhaust the kinds of dependency/subjugation that existed in the world. The academic definition of colonialism now includes all kinds of dependency/domination and not just what existed in European overseas empires, and thus it can encompass English rule in Ireland, French rule in Algeria, Japanese rule in Korea, American control of the Philippines, and Russian rule over Ukraine, even though these cases departed in details from the colonialism of European overseas empires.^[36] Recent scholarship also accepts that the political and psychological aspects of colonial rule are as significant as its economic aspects, that rulers were not exceptionally powerful or decisive, that the ruled could exercise initiative, and that each of these elements must be explored and given its due weight. Foreign rule everywhere involved hybrids, collaborators, mediators, and multiple levels of authority all differently affected by central rulers – with the division between ruler and ruled even running within families. Tacitus tells us that Arminius, leader of a massive anti-Roman revolt, had a brother, Flavus, who served Rome. In short, as an analytical category, colonialism need not reduce its subject to binary relationships between “natives” by “settlers.”
Nor does the absence of private ownership of the means of production in Soviet-type countries mean that “colonialism” there was impossible because there was no capitalism. On the one hand, capitalism is not defined by private ownership but by the relations of production. In Soviet countries these relations included production and exchange of commodities for profit. Whether profits go to directors running private corporations, or to government directors makes little difference. Because profit/surplus product goes to a council of commissars, it does not mean that the creation of that profit was unrelated to subordination, exploitation, violence, expropriation, and/or extraction of surplus value, or that producers had any say in what they produced and how it was distributed. On the other hand, since the domination now subsumed under the terms “imperialism” and “colonialism” existed long before capitalism, whether or not “state capitalism” existed in the USSR is irrelevant to discussions of domination, exploitation, and extraction of wealth there.
Finally, while discrimination and/or exclusion under colonialism is normally linked to visible traits such as race, it can also result from behavior. Public use of Ukrainian (except during the mid-twenties) outside strictly defined limits, for instance, put speakers under suspicion, and even surveillance, as “unpatriotic” and potentially disloyal “nationalists.” Already in 1921 the Cheka began registering people it deemed “suspicious.” By the time the order reached its Ukrainian provincial officers, its list of 20 categories included not only anyone connected in any way to all non-Bolshevik governments but also “all nationalists of all stripes and hues.” A political prisoner related that in 1933 an interrogator told him all he had to do to round up “Ukrainian nationalists” was to arrest the subscribers of Ukrainian-language publications.^[37] Ignorance of Russian before 1923 and after 1937, meanwhile, meant low-paying jobs and low social status.
In light of these considerations there is no reason to exclude subjugated European countries like Ireland or Ukraine from the category “colonial” or discussions about colonialism. The role of profit, power, and status in relations between peoples and countries, Russia and Ukraine included, cannot be ignored in the name of political expediency or academic fashion, and a comparative colonialism model is a means of studying those relations. To account for differences between land and overseas colonies we might simply introduce a subvariant of the concept. This is what Ukrainian communists did in the 1920s with the term “colony of the European type.”^[38]While the term is unacceptable as it would exclude countries similar to Ukraine like Korea or Algeria, the idea was correct and should be pursued. Such a subvariant can figure within one of the four types of colonialism historians have identified: plantation, administrative, settler, and mixed settler.^[39]
In 2008 a very close friend of Vladimir Putin, Silvio Berlusconi, visited Muammar Qaddafi in Tripoli. As president of Italy, 61 years after Italy renounced all claims to Libya, he gave Qaddafi 5 billion euros and an apology for 30 years of Italian colonialism (1912–1943). Perhaps Qaddafi mentioned this to Viktor Iushchenko when he visited Kyiv that year. Even if he did, it may still be too early for Ukraine’s president to approach Russia’s president about a similar gesture of reconciliation. But in 60 years perhaps historians will arrive at a consensus about whether or not Ukraine was a Russian colony.